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Reading all this gave me the scary thought again I formed some months back: That if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn't commit suicide and grew up, there's a not too insignificant chance that one or both of them would've worked for ICE. 😬

This goes hand in hand with the "Left Behind" rapture porn with which so many "christians" are obsessed. They believe if the world ends during in their lifetime they won't even have to suffer the indignity of dying; they'll just be whisked up to heaven leaving us sinners to clean up their mess.

Plausible? Definitely it is. McCarthyism, full stop.

It genuinely all made sense to me when I found this image a few years ago and researched the Spanish fascists who used it. It just seems so cartoonish, like a cartoon villain’s ideology, but it becomes clear when you understand these people want to die, just not alone. bsky.app/profile/anar...

Yes, and it is also why there is never an end goal for people in these groups. They do not aspire to any future reality...because they can't comprehend one. They think only in immediate terms and solving the problems a single step ahead of them.

Disagree in the sense that all dictatorships devolve into personal corruption. The ideology becomes branding, window dressing.

Strikes me as definitely part of it. Reminds me of a toddler throwing a tantrum that breaks his toy when told to share it or because it wouldn't work precisely the way he wanted, etc. These people were the toddlers who didn't exhibit any regret after the maelstrom. The signs are there early.

I’m not saying it can’t change! Just that it may get darker before the dawn.

I think this explains why knitters turn political at times like this. It's literally the opposite worldview: just keep going steady at something you like doing and wonderful things will result.

There's been some scholarship about the idea over the past 50 years, e.g. www.reddit.com/r/Deleuze/co...

Yes, many MAGA supporters are believers because they are deeply invested in fulfilling a national political murder-suicide pact—it is the non-religious version of Christian Nationalist "rapture" politics.

Also see… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_su...

edmund ruffin decided to shoot himself after lee surrendered at appomattox. 70 years later, du bois summed him up (fudging his name) saying when he fired on fort sumter, he freed the slaves.

Self Negation is the secret sauce of Fascism.

People standing up and being brave is contagious. I have a feeling there are still a lot of good people in America.

They worship Rome because it was big, powerful, killed a lot of people and died, leaving impressive ruins.

The shooter didn't write that on the shell casings, and personally I think ascribing a less senseless motivation is cope. It's easier and more comforting to believe than "lol deth". I really don't know though, this mindset is profoundly alien.

Yeah this made me go back to my Foucault where he says the Nazi State is one where “we have an absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state, and an absolutely suicidal state…The three were necessarily superimposed.”

Our little meager *democracy* (that has only v recently included everybody, sort of) is the historical anomaly. That we are equal was a profoundly revolutionary idea many had to die for. Anyway, I present this not to enervate but to bring the stakes into focus & prepare yall for the fight to come

It fuses with the apocalyptic eschatology of many evangelicals in a way that adds gasoline. On their best days, most evangelicals think "what's the point of worrying about the climate, God's going to destroy it all soon anyway", and it only goes downhill from there.

I think they *do* care about climate catastrophe, in that, at least subconsciously, they see a slow motion oncoming train wreck getting closer and faster with no possibility of salvation. See also: no hope of improving life for their or the next generation. Hence the death wish.

Maybe climate anxiety is why they've given up and don't care.

They think he predicted 2025 in Revelations 22:12-15 and the End Days are nearly upon us. (I read those in 7 different bible versions and they are um creative in their interpretation.) They love Trump because he’s “hastening it” so still believe every blatant lie he tells and promise he makes.

Christians really go downhill when they just latch onto "Jesus will forgive me" and use it as an excuse.

I think that’s probably a lot closer to the school shooter mentality.

I think you're right, extremist Christians are similar, but it's the other way around. The "rapture" is the excuse/opportunity to engage in the suicide pact. They don't really believe anything, the "glory" is the terrible action itself. It's an apt comparison, but you give them way too much credit

I hadn't really thought of it this way before but yeah, between all that and the Evangelicals of it all, the right really is just a bunch of death cults stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat, huh.

I’ll see you in Valhalla, but Valhalla looks like a Buffalo Wild Wings

Family annihilation adjacent in several ways

I think this is pretty spot on - if you look past the bs wrapping of racial supremacy- the Nazi thing was a death cult.

also so incredibly gung ho with uncontrolled AI, like they are fishing for some world ending disaster. Hitler in the bunker with the big red button

Fascism is capitalism in decay. It is, in all aspects, an extension of capitalism. It is when the most reactionary forces of capital move to clamp down on the working class in situations of crisis. Fascism is so much more than just gestapo and camps.

I’d love to hear her explain to someone in real life what deserves such retribution. I can guess but I still want to hear it.

Thats the way I feel. I think Homan, Noem, and Miller should be handed death penalties for the ICE murders. I know Ds would never do that. They want to give them more money.

She'll deny she ever said this, just as many Germans did. Ever see the movie The Nasty Girl? It's a about a German teenager who's town prided itself on "resisting the Nazis", except when she goes to write about it, she learns that they were collaborators, and they threaten her to keep her quiet.

Or to readers that this isn't a girl

those people really do like yukio mishima a lot, damn, this really nails it actually.

The people with the nuclear codes. In case you weren't anxious enough

History tells us that fascism eventually comes for everyone. It's not some mystery unlocked by a few, it's on full display for anyone willing to look. If I've noticed, then it is obvious. It folds in on itself. It's leaders look to tear things down and don't stop until everything is consumed

Never mind, got it.

Also, as seen in the movie "Downfall", there were roving gangs of vigilantes in Berlin in 1945 hunting down and executing German civilians who tried to flee the city or who simply refused to join the barricades.

"there are suicides which do not have anything to do with mental illness or some moral and intellectual deviance, but predominantly with the continuity of a heavy political defeat and the fear of being held responsible"

it's worth reading the article because making no one else do it is probably going to take a lot of work with all the propaganda they're given by the right about the people left of em

imo the game is so much more tenuous than anyone realizes, and that horrifies me because I feel like i only know 10% of the history I need to

Don't discount the possibility that there might be a nihilist's "Pascal's Wager" in that they also hold out a possibility -however remote - for ultimate triumphant, glorious success after successfully destroying all else in their path. But if not, meh, eat the bullet. So a "win-win"

wake up babe, we're rehashing ernst becker thought again en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Den...

Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor are currently expanding this thesis into a book, due later this year www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

incidentally, it's also the most patriotic thing a fedchud could do

I remember that film. But I think Douglas’s character was more nuanced than some of these MAGA simpleton fucks. And he was middle aged. Not the incel living in his mother’s basement.

Zoinks. And also, probably true

But they can be easily manipulated. They lack critical thinking. It should be easy to coerce them to harm themselves under the right conditions.

Anybody standing up against the regime becomes guilty and worthy of death. Look how quickly they demonized Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

flight mh370 election. otherwise yes.

Don’t say this to Tom Nichols!

bsky.app/profile/mbdr...

I'm reminded of the official ideology of Eastasia in '1984', which was "a Chinese character translated as 'Death-worship' or 'Obliteration of the Self" (I'm paraphrasing).

My description of Stephen Miller tracks with this 1:1 bsky.app/profile/john...

So wonderful to think that they have nuclear weapons.

This is absolutely why I think anybody who thinks Trump wouldn't get us into a nuclear war and think it's "great TV" is extremely naive.

I agree. But I also wonder if their goal is nihilism, then why not push the button and avoid a slow decline. But maybe it’s the sadism in them that they want to see the world suffer by degrees before they torch it.

This is blowing my mind.

A mythology of martyrdom with nothing worth martyring themselves for.

Who’d have thought, after all of the hand-wringing about yellowcake in Iraq or nukes in Iran, that the actual suicidal lunatics would be home-grown in the USA?

Filing this under "all cults are death cults"

Similar to something I've been saying madness.ghost.io/the-mass-sho...

www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ideologies/r...

Google Lee Miller Suicide Pictures (Lee Miller is the famous photographer who had a picture taken of herself in Hitler's bathtub)

That's probably the best video I've seem in the past 12 months

Been doin' some thankin'

Nancy Fraser's Cannibal Capitalism is a really good exploration of this idea (also see Seymour's The Rise of Disaster Nationalism)

"Faye's inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements ... they always contain the ... cry 'Long live death!', even at the economic level ..." -- Thousand Plateaus ... and Paul Virilio called fascism the "suicidal state" too

Powerful

Lordy. This is frightening

cc: @debwontshutup.bsky.social

He will gleefully encourage each person in the death cult to off themselves until there's none left as long as it keeps him alive.

If there were rebels standing over the bunker I still don't think he could bring himself to shoot himself.

I say we just give them Idaho and watch what they do.

The only decision we're really making is whether our side survives or we let these degenerates drag us to hell with them

They only look for useful idiots who can be exploited and discarded, not fellow travelers. To the bitter end hitler blamed everyone else for simply not working and fighting hard enough, not sacrificing enough, not being loyal enough for the failure of the Reich, Not is policies or it’s fuhrer.

I wrote similarly last year about the attacks on trans people too, academic source below

It's the only logic, if there is any at all, that we can assign to what we're observing and experiencing.

World war II's end was as far as 2011 is from us. I'm sure it was still very much in the public consciousness. There's nothing new under the sun.

This helps me to be happy I could never fit in or follow any group think…. at all. I guess my maladaption has worked out after all.

The other thing it reminds me of is Lee Sandlin talking about Hitler’s morbid obsession with the “ruin value” of the building projects he would meddle in, constantly imagining how they would look once they were empty and abandoned after the death of the Reich www.leesandlin.com/articles/Los...